Change supply meter so that getting killed isn't an advantage

(Stormchild) #21

So, I suppose all of you who think that “dying shouldn’t be part of the tactic” to get supply or anything, also agree that a /kill bind command shouldn’t be implemented ?

I’m all ok for that, but it’s not a bother for me ingame. Especially with the medic, I have so many pips with this dude. One just need to prioritize.

  • I won’t give ammo to mates that aren’t neat empty clips and close to a CP (run to CP = recharges ammo, why waste a pip). I scavenge whenever I can, and keep my pips for nades (flash, normal, napalm).
  • I won’t revive all the time my mates, it depends how many pips I have left because some of them are more critical to rez than others (and gotta keep one for necheyev ;-). I use lazarus when I can to save pips too, and I drop the health booster ph4llus instead of using several pips on metabolism boost.
  • I only give kevlar to medics or players that I think are good and whose potential will be even more deadly with an armor. Same for weapon tweak.
  • I don’t have much pips issues at all with operative anyway.

When it can happen that I am out of pip, I only blame it on my management, or skill choice. Some skills are meant to be use frequently and are big pip consumers, whereas some can be seldom (soldier C4, spiky, health regen boost pole, …).

(tokamak) #22

I’m not saying that the act of killing yourself can’t be difficult in a game. I’m merely saying that the game clearly is doing something wrong if it’s encourages people to kill themselves as a form of ‘reboot’ once in a while. And because it can be so tremendously advantageous in ET, people are compelled to use it or they’ll handicap themselves.

Now you can force people to stick to their lives by removing the self kill, like in Brink, but the game would better if it was balanced in such a way that players would be rewarded for staying around. Deaths should be meaningful, that by itself makes kills meaningful and through that all other abilities in the game become meaningful. Permanent buffs like metabolism and extra pips will be greatly sought after, because people’s potential (not necessary average) life expectancy last longer you’ll see more players requiring ammo more often, and players wouldn’t just lemming their way through the maps.

By the way, what type of game do you think isn’t incredibly simplistic? Even in CS I can think of times where I would purposely put myself in a situation to just carelessly give up my virtual life, lol.

Yeah for extra kills perhaps, but not for the next respawn.

(Dots) #23

Might make the battle to keep a command post more meaningful as well.

It could work similar to upgrading/firewalling the command post. Not an instantaneous action.

(tokamak) #24

Can’t really see any objection to it yeah. Command posts need to be more important anyway.

Another thing I can imagine is giving a supply regeneration bonus to each person you buff. In other words, a team that continuously buffs itself will have a bigger ‘supply economy’ than a team that doesn’t or where only a few individuals use their buffs.

(Thundermuffin) #25

[QUOTE=tokamak;376736]I’m not saying that the act of killing yourself can’t be difficult in a game. I’m merely saying that the game clearly is doing something wrong if it’s encourages people to kill themselves as a form of ‘reboot’ once in a while. And because it can be so tremendously advantageous in ET, people are compelled to use it or they’ll handicap themselves.

Now you can force people to stick to their lives by removing the self kill, like in Brink, but the game would better if it was balanced in such a way that players would be rewarded for staying around. Deaths should be meaningful, that by itself makes kills meaningful and through that all other abilities in the game become meaningful. Permanent buffs like metabolism and extra pips will be greatly sought after, because people’s potential (not necessary average) life expectancy last longer you’ll see more players requiring ammo more often, and players wouldn’t just lemming their way through the maps. [/QUOTE]
In a game like ET:QW, you don’t really self kill all that often to “reboot” yourself. BRINK just handles supplies really poorly and forces you to run out way too soon if you do your job.

In ET:QW I’d rarely selfkill to get more medpacks/ammo (always played medic in comp), but I would selfkill to get back with my team. That is perfectly acceptable; it was really annoying in BRINK to be that one guy that didn’t get killed during a push and have to either run back to spawn or hope the other team didn’t see you, because that would put you off a spawn wave and ruin another push. See, I stayed alive like you want me to, but what did I accomplish or what could I accomplish? I’m low on health, supplies, and I’m away from my team so I’m useless.

You can’t really have meaningful deaths when the game is as random as BRINK; maybe if the game had accurate weapons, punished you for doing stupid stuff, and removed a lot of the useless crap it would have meaningful kills and deaths. Right now, the most meaningful kill you can achieve is killing and gibbing the defuser, but that’s still up to a lotto spread + grenade shooting, lol.

I think a lot of the supply problems that medics have, have to do with the fact reviving and health buffs come from one supply pool. That really hurts the system right there and promotes less teamplay than /kill. You have to pick or choose whether to revive or buff with that 1 pip, while in ET:QW you were able to throw a medpack and revive.

Nah, I meant if we were going into plant on like de_cbble, I’d gladly run through apartments making noise if I knew there were people in there and could draw their fire so someone else could clean them up.

(tokamak) #26

[QUOTE=Thundermuffin;376778]In a game like ET:QW, you don’t really self kill all that often to “reboot” yourself. BRINK just handles supplies really poorly and forces you to run out way too soon if you do your job.

In ET:QW I’d rarely selfkill to get more medpacks/ammo (always played medic in comp), but I would selfkill to get back with my team. That is perfectly acceptable.[/QUOTE]

In games anything that is possible is acceptable it doesn’t mean it’s good gameplay.

You can’t really have meaningful deaths when the game is as random as BRINK; maybe if the game had accurate weapons, punished you for doing stupid stuff, and removed a lot of the useless crap it would have meaningful kills and deaths. Right now, the most meaningful kill you can achieve is killing and gibbing the defuser, but that’s still up to a lotto spread + grenade shooting, lol.

I completely agree that Brink is a crap game. My point about using everything to make the lives of a player more valuable still stands.

Nah, I meant if we were going into plant on like de_cbble, I’d gladly run through apartments making noise if I knew there were people in there and could draw their fire so someone else could clean them up.

Or that, just not to get a cheap replenish annex teleport.

(Thundermuffin) #27

You’d rather me sit there and be useless to my team? I wouldn’t be able to actually push forward, because it’d be a situation that isn’t winnable, but if I tried to run back to my team someone would probably see me and just kill me (and we’d be back to the whole I’m off a respawn wave and holding my team up deal).

(Baumbo) #28

I find that whenever I run out of supply as a medic my team has pretty much already wiped. I like the system as it is now.

edit: Actually, I think people are getting confused between rewarding death, and not penalizing it. Rewarding death is like the CoD deathstreaks. Penalizing death would be like rez sickness from many MMOs.

(tokamak) #29

Yes I’d rather you would, the onus is on you to prevent that from happening. And that’s why the game should give you more incentives to invest in your life more.

(Thundermuffin) #30

There’s a lot of times where even though I’m a medic I can’t prevent that from happening; flashbangs, ambushes on doorways, 2-2-1 splits, etc., are all times where I can’t actually react to it or stop it from happening, because I’m not always the first one to enter the room, nor am I always with the team.

How the heck does that make me invest in my life more? All a situation like that does is show me how bad a game is, especially when there isn’t anything I could actually do to stop what happened, to get myself out of that area after my team wiped, or be useful to my team from that position. If my team were to wipe in BRINK, I would just be sitting there for forever, but in ET:QW I could at least /kill and get back to the game. A player should never just be standing still on offense in an ET game except for very, very situational circumstances.

Games shouldn’t be about valuing some virtual life as if it were real.

(gooey79) #31

If you’ve used up all your pips on the team and then strategically respawned to be on hand with pips instead of hoping they recharge before your next ‘natural’ death, isn’t that helping the team?

Surely in the team environment the emphasis is on what’s best for the team, not what’s necessarily best for the individual.

(Spendlove) #32

Limited lives and no timer is a nice server option I would like to see.

That would sort the adults from the kids and you would see some amazing team play.

(Pelendran) #33

I do like the idea of making command posts fill your supply meter similar to how they give you ammo. Don’t make them reset your cooldowns or anything though.

(H0RSE) #34

[QUOTE=tokamak;376583]That’s the problem. Dying on purpose shouldn’t be rewarding, ever.

Letting people start with half the supply meter would already solve a few things. It would also solve the buffing circlejerk during each start.[/QUOTE]

Why not? Becuase it is pretty standard practice that dying in games, regardless of genre, is looked at as a bad thing and in many cases, incurs a penalty as well, whether a player has a set number of lives, dying involves losing xp/gold or dying simply = game over. Player death(s) in games should never be a means to gain an advantage, regardless if it deliberately executed with a command (/kill) or otherwise.

Oh, and just because other games reward self-killing, doesn’t make it any better…it simply means those games are flawed as well.

(Humate) #35

//youtu.be/cl_6q557AkY

warning contains explicit language

Like I said - this works in team based fps as well

(Thundermuffin) #36

You respawn with a full set of ammo and full HP bar in like every game known to man (or in arena shooters, you respawn with full health + a stocked machinegun-like weapon); do you want to take that advantage away, too? Should you just respawn with 1 HP and your fists?

Humate has a perfect example in his post, and he’s right that easily transfers to team based FPS games. Heck, go watch some of the Quakecon TDM videos with iCE cLIMBERS and you’ll see them sacrifice themselves on purpose a lot.

I don’t understand how you can view this as a bad thing; it doesn’t disrupt gameplay, it keeps the game going and flowing well as no one is trying to camp around health packs/ammo packs or waiting for supply pips, or just being useless to their team. I guess you all would rather have someone hiding in a corner, waiting for his team and being useless than having someone /kill out, respawn with their team and actually have a good push. /killing out would make for a better game, for sure, but whatever floats your boat.

Dying can still be seen as a “bad” thing with /kill or some suicide command in the game as it could lower your score or just ruin your k/d ratio, but the good players don’t care about that as long as they still get the win. That’s all that really matters, after having fun, in games.

(RabidAnubis) #37

[QUOTE=Spendlove;376808]Limited lives and no timer is a nice server option I would like to see.

That would sort the adults from the kids and you would see some amazing team play.[/QUOTE]

Socom.

1 life.

****load of tactics.

5 min respawn.

(H0RSE) #38

Now you are simply arguing semantics and being a smartass. Respawning with bare minimum or default tools is also a common practice in games. Items/abilities, etc. that allow for bonus skills to be used (like the supply meter) are typically stripped away from the player after death, thus using death or respawns to bypass disadvantages (like no energy left on supply meter) is unacceptable. WoW is a good example of how death should not be used to bypass situations. In WoW, if you have a cooldown on an ability or item, etc. after death, that cooldown still applies. It is not canceled out or reset. Similarly, the supply meter in Brink should always have a continuous, uninterpretable regen rate, even after the player dies. If you want a way to refill your Supply Meter, perhaps make it a player/class ability or make it refillable at Command Posts.

(shirosae) #39

This is the mistake you’re making: You’re trying to convince them that dying can be tactically useful; and therefore dying in a game can be a valid choice. You’re right about this. The problem is that they don’t care. They don’t assign value to things by how tactical/well functioning they are. They assign value in games based on what ideas they like in concept, and want games to fit this internal hierarchy even when it doesn’t apply*.

Their problem isn’t that dying in games isn’t tactical. Their problem is that it is. Because they desperately need ‘my death’ = ‘always bad’, for some reason they’ll never explain to you. It’s the same thing you tend to see with TK-Revives, trickjumping etc. People see a concept they don’t like, and immediately demand that it must not be useful. Just put it down to more Justice-Leaguery and move on.

(*Imagine a game like Brink, an objective based arena shooter, with limited lives? The lottery spread would become a one-life-lottery, with even more camping and turtling and defensive bias.

That said, I’m absolutely for adding a game mode that lets players turn off TK-Revives, Trickjumping, with limited lives, no resupply on respawn etc on all games ever in the future. Just so these people who absolutely need the game to conform to their vague set of cognitive biases can go and play terrible games hiding from each other whilst the rest of us play on servers not contaminated with the silliness.)

(.Chris.) #40

[QUOTE=Humate;376668]On salvage when we could make spawn hosts on the last objective, we would offer these to our 4 “decoys” (keep in mind this is 6v6). When timed correctly with the spawn wave timer, they would engage the enemy bait them away from the objective - while 2 aggressors would do assisted double plants… the decoys then /kill on the dime. Most of the time, the enemy doesnt know about the spawnhosts, so they assume they have enough time to engage the planters and defuse. But what happens is they get sandwhiched by the same guys who baited them and the aggressors who planted, with the added bonus of the enemy already being low on HP from the first engagement.

Another really simple one we used to do salvage (remember its stopwatch), was all /kill into infiltrator after the mining laser… teleport over as a suprise attack, cap spawn then /kill into normal classes. On the surface, it doesnt seem that big of a deal. But stopwatch is about shaving time… and against a team thats of equal skill that usually = win. You shave about 40seconds to 1.5 minutes off a normal bunker charge approach. Also means you dont need to 4v6 on the mining laser phase so you can get early charges on the bunkers.

edit: soz for off-topic post :c[/QUOTE]

Exactly, self killing was quite important tactic when playing matches, public and competition alike, I see no problem what so ever with using it for an advantage especially when the game actually encourages it, spawn hosts seem the perfect partner for self killing for reasons you’ve pointed out.

Other tactics included waiting to fully capture a forward spawn till there is 1 second left on the respawn wave then getting your whole team to selfkill so you all spawn at the newly captured spawn making it hard for the enemy to quickly take it back.

Also timing when objectives/stages ended was crucial so you could selfkill and change class and respawn at the new spawn as soon as the objective just ended.

Again I don’t see these as negatives and can’t possibly see why some do, well you could argue realism but yeah that’s a weak excuse, I dont buy the whole it devalues survival thing either, teams mostly prefer keeping pressure on the defense, in situations were selfkills are performed it’s normally in situation where they are as good as dead anyway and they are just limiting the damage done by ensuring they spawn as a team together.